An optical amplifier is a device that amplifies an optical signal directly, without the need to first convert it to an electrical signal. An optical amplifier may be thought of as a laser without an optical cavity, or one in which feedback from the cavity is suppressed. Optical amplifiers are important in optical communication and laser physics.
There are several different physical mechanisms that can be used to amplify a light signal, which correspond to the major types of optical amplifiers. In Doped Fiber Amplifiers (DFAs) and fiber lasers, stimulated emission in the amplifier's gain medium causes amplification of incoming light. In Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers (SOAs), electron-hole recombination occurs. In Raman amplifiers, Raman scattering of incoming light with phonons in the lattice of the gain medium produces photons coherent with the incoming photons. Parametric amplifiers use parametric amplification.
Doped fiber amplifiers (DFAs) are optical amplifiers that use a doped optical fiber as a gain medium to amplify an optical signal. They are related to fiber lasers. The signal to be amplified and a pump laser are multiplexed into the doped fiber, and the signal is amplified through interaction with the doping ions. The most common example is the Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA), where the core of a silica fiber is doped with trivalent erbium ions and can be efficiently pumped with a laser at a wavelength of 980 nm or 1,480 nm, and exhibits gain in the 1,550 nm region.
Semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) are amplifiers that use a semiconductor to provide the gain medium. These amplifiers have a similar structure to Fabry-Perot laser diodes but with anti-reflection design elements at the end faces. Recent designs include anti-reflective coatings and tilted waveguide and window regions which can reduce end face reflection to less than 0.001%. Since this creates a loss of power from the cavity that is greater than the gain, it prevents the amplifier from acting as a laser. Another type of SOA consists of two regions. One part has a structure of a Fabry-Pérot laser diode and the other has a tapered geometry in order to reduce the power density on the output facet.
Semiconductor optical amplifiers are typically made from group III-V compound semiconductors such as GaAs/AlGaAs, InP/InGaAs, InP/InGaAsP and InP/InAlGaAs, though any direct band gap semiconductors such as II-VI could conceivably be used. Such amplifiers are often used in telecommunication systems in the form of fiber-pigtailed components, operating at signal wavelengths between 0.85 μm and 1.6 μm and generating gains of up to 30 dB.
The semiconductor optical amplifier is of small size and electrically pumped. It can be potentially less expensive than the EDFA and can be integrated with semiconductor lasers, modulators, etc. However, the performance is still not comparable with the EDFA. The SOA has higher noise, lower gain, moderate polarization dependence and high nonlinearity with fast transient time. The main advantage of SOA is that all four types of nonlinear operations (cross gain modulation, cross phase modulation, wavelength conversion and four wave mixing) can be conducted. Furthermore, SOA can be run with a low power laser.
In a Raman amplifier, the signal is intensified by Raman amplification that is achieved by a nonlinear interaction between the signal and a pump laser within an optical fiber. There are two types of Raman amplifiers: distributed and lumped. A distributed Raman amplifier is one in which the transmission fiber is utilized as the gain medium by multiplexing a pump wavelength with signal wavelength, while a lumped Raman amplifier utilizes a dedicated, shorter length of fiber to provide amplification. In the case of a lumped Raman amplifier highly nonlinear fiber with a small core is utilized to increase the interaction between signal and pump wavelengths and thereby reduce the length of fiber required.